I would love a more challenging overland. Your suggestion makes me cringe though... severely nerfing the players power would feel like a fake difficulty. Just increase the monster health and monster damage by 300% or more. And also add on more special abilities for monsters.

I remember how challenging overland was when this game launched and you started questing in veteran zones and caldwell's gold.. that was fun!

Rave the Histborn wrote: »

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Taleof2Cities wrote: »

Why do players insist on adding harder content ... when they don’t participate in the existing hard content currently available in the game?

Because if you look at their posts the titles of the threads are "Muh difficulty" but if you read the bodies and what they want they really just want more stuff

No.

Instead of reducing the player's damage healing and shields I would like to see two separate instances.
One normal instance that is the same the today's overland.
One veteran instance where mobs have increased health and deal more damage.

This way your dps, healing and dmg shields keep the same values but you dont kill a boss at the end of a quest after 3 second. Maybe you even have to slot a heal because the incoming dmg is more than you can heal with your health regen.

Those who think harder content is not needed: many people want to be engaged in the game. that is why there are veteran dungeons and trials.

Those who think there is no need for extra reward: do you think those who want to get engaged will play veteran content if there is no extra reward? No, they wont play veteran. No one gonna cripple himself to play harder game. Look at all PvEers. They are grinding for hours to get stronger a bit. They wont cripple them selfs any day!

We get better reward for harder content at veteran dungeons and trials. Adding harder outland content will give extra content to play for hardcore players.

Universe wrote: »

11.Players who set the toggle as ON will be able to see and group with each other on the same phase.
Lower and higher difficulty players will not be able to attack the same monsters.
There will be no mix of lower and higher difficulty.

You can' t do this. In some areas (live Vvardenfell) you already can't find people to fight WB 90% of the time.
Splitting up the playerbase will makes matters even worse.

In ESO, we had a zone with high difficulty, and it was dead most of time - old Craglorn Absolute fail, and it was correctly fixed by developers

Old Craglorn actually somewhat reminds me of modern GW2. People run away from mobs cause it's very easy to die even to non-bosses, and most of overland in expac zones is empty - just lot of deadly mobs around, with occasional lonely player here or there. You can only see groups of players if they farm certain events for achivs/meta loot If you struggle to follow the event farm group cause you don't have certain mount/glider mechanic unlocked, and you die to fast-respawning mobs - tough luck, nobody will return and help you out.
You don't see players actually explore and marvel at the beauty of the maps; such moments are only possible in safe cities, or if people fly high above the dangers on Griffon, or perch at some place where mobs can't attack them (and ranged mobs have ridiculous hard-hitting long range attacks).

ESO is still beautiful and relaxing game overland, it doesn't need same awful difficulty as GW2 has.

While the option you typed out is pretty cool, I feel like just the world bosses should be increased to be on par, not with Dragons, but with the harrowstorms on the PTS. Something in between the normal WBs and dragons difficulty. Same with dungeons; They should add a HM to be pressed at the start to then increase the health/damage of all the mobs inside the dungeon and maybe add some new mechanics to each boss or so.

Septimus_Magna wrote: »

From what I understand there are already multiple instances for zones, so not everyone in a zone appears on your screen.

There are, but introducing new instances for different difficulty settings would add even more. Normal/Vet would double them, Normal/Hard/Vet would triple them, Easy/Normal/Hard/Vet would quadruple them, Easy/Normal/Hard/Vet/Legendary would quintuple them.

This is why introducing a player debuff is the better solution, because it accomplishes the same thing (see below for explanation as to how it does), while keeping everyone in the same instance as they were before.

Septimus_Magna wrote: »

Dark Souls III had a ring to make it more difficult but most players preferred NG+ because it feels more challenging instead of intentionally gimping yourself.

This is just a type of cognitive bias, all it is. Think about it logically.

Say a player is fighting a mob. Mob has 20k health, player has 25k health. Player deals 2k DPS to mob, mob deals 500 DPS to player. (Player might have been healing to offset mob's damage, or might have high resists.)

Player kills mob in 10 seconds, while losing only around 5k health over that 10 seconds, or 20% health.

Now say the player enters a vet zone, where mob health and damage is doubled. Mob now has 40k health, and deals 1k damage a second to player. Player still has 25k health, and still deals 2k DPS to mob.

Player kills mob in 20 seconds, player loses 20k health over that 10 seconds, or 80% health. Mob health doubled, so fight duration doubled. Mob damage doubled, which when combined with fight duration, means total received damage quadrupled for the player.

Now say the player goes back to a regular zone, but instead increases his difficulty up to a setting, where his damage done is halved, and damage received is doubled. Mob goes back to 20k health every second, but still deals 1k damage a second to player, as player damage received doubled. Player still has 25k health, but now deals only 1k DPS to mob, as player damage done halved.

Player kills mob in 20 seconds, player loses 20k health over that 10 seconds, or 80% health. Mob health has gone back to normal, but player damage has been halved, which has had the same effect as doubling mob health, meaning fight duration still doubles. Player's damage received has also doubled, which has the effect of the mob damage effectively being doubled, which when combined with the fight duration still doubling, means the total received damage still quadrupled for the player.

One difficulty system changes the mobs, another changes the player, but they both resulted in the same outcome. This works for any percentage increase, provided the player changes are the reciprocal of the mob changes (ie `player_change = 1.0 / mob_change`), because math.

An increase in 50% would be a 1.5x increase, and the reciprocal of that (`1.0 / 1.5`) is 0.6666667, ie 2/3's. So increasing mob health and damage by 50% would have the same effect as reducing the player's damage done and increasing the player's damage received by 33.334%.

(If you don't believe me, try it yourself. Open your calculator app, and type in `30000 / 2000` (1.5x mob health, divided by regular player DPS), then type in `20000 / (2000 * 0.6666667)` (regular mob health, divided by 2/3's player DPS), and compare. Both should result in ~15, or around 15 seconds.)

Same outcome, and yet people seemingly prefer the system that changes the mobs, because they don't like the fact that they're being gimped, despite both having the same outcome.

If it were up to me, I'd just roll the debuff out, and say "it just makes the game harder", without going into details, but if that doesn't satisfy you, not sure how you'd solve this issue.

Septimus_Magna wrote: »

An item or debuff to make it more challenging could work in ESO, maybe as a mythic item.
For example, a necklace that greatly improves drops from mobs but you deal 80% less damage, take 50% more damage and healing is reduced by 50%. Only problem is that a player without this item/debuff could help you to easily kill mobs.

IMO, you shouldn't have to go out of your way to get this, it should just be implemented as an automatically applied debuff, that only applies in overland zones, with multiple levels of damage done/received scaling (ie Easy, Normal, Hard, Expert, Veteran, Legendary difficulties), defaulting to what we have now.

Not what I'd want them spending time and resources on--and certainly if implemented spending resources to provide the desired challenge should be the reward.

@eKsDee if you only care about the outcome you can un-equip all your equipment and fight mobs unarmed. Now the game is more challenging but did the experience improve? Why do normal and veteran dungeons have the same mobs but they have more health and deal more dmg? Because you want to feel like you deal the same amount of dmg, even if you fight stronger mobs. I dont want to get my calculator after a fight to understand if I did better or worse compared to the dungeon I just did.

There dont have to be less players in each instance if normal and veteran overland were separated, a couple of the the instances would just be veteran instead of normal. The amount of players in each instance can remain the same. Maybe if there was a challenge and reward while doing overland content there would be more players in old zones.

Septimus_Magna wrote: »

if you only care about the outcome you can un-equip all your equipment and fight mobs unarmed. Now the game is more challenging but did the experience improve?

One of these things is not like the other. If I were to gimp myself manually, I'd have to go out of my way to undo all of my progression, while if the game automatically did it for me, it's just scaling my effectiveness.

Really, how different is this to the current scaling put in place for newer players? It's literally the same thing, it's just that with a difficulty setting, you have control over how the game scales you.

Again, it's a form of cognitive bias. The outcome is the exact same between the two. If all a veteran zone did was apply a hidden debuff to you, you wouldn't care, because you don't know it's even gimping you. It's only when you're told that it's gimping you, that you suddenly care.

Septimus_Magna wrote: »

Why do normal and veteran dungeons have the same mobs but they have more health and deal more dmg? Because you want to feel like you deal the same amount of dmg, even if you fight stronger mobs. I dont want to get my calculator after a fight to understand if I did better or worse compared to the dungeon I just did.

My calculations show that it's the exact same no matter which way you go about it. Same damage against double mob health has the exact same outcome as half damage against same mob health.

Unless you care about the exact numbers being shown (which even they can be altered, as I'll explain next), the fight should feel the exact same. That's what all that math I did shows.

And if you do care about the exact numbers being shown, again I'll point you to the current scaling, but even more so, the numbers just have to show the damage before the multiplier (as well as their client reporting mob health to be increased based on that multiplier, only for their client), and suddenly the player literally cannot tell the difference.

They will see the same damage being dealt against a higher health pool, when they're actually dealing less damage against the same health pool, and it doesn't matter, because the math checks out both ways.

You don't ever need to know how it works, you just need to know it works, and that's very obvious to tell when fights take longer and the perceived target health is higher (whether by feeling higher, or being reported by the client as being higher).

Septimus_Magna wrote: »

There dont have to be less players in each instance if normal and veteran overland were separated, a couple of the the instances would just be veteran instead of normal. The amount of players in each instance can remain the same. Maybe if there was a challenge and reward while doing overland content there would be more players in old zones.

This literally makes zero sense. You have a fixed amount of players in a zone instance, that we'll just call 100% of players.

If we assume 10% of those players want to play in a vet zone, then that 10% will be moved into a new vet instance, with the remaining 90% staying in the normal instance. A new instance was created, and the population in the existing instance has been split between them.

Unless new players are coming into either instance that weren't already entering the instance (ie a vet player who previously didn't touch overland, now wants to do it because of the vet difficulty mode), the same amount of players is having to be split between two instances, which means each instance now has less players.

It's not even math, it's basic logic. Splitting 100% of something doesn't magically add more to it. Splitting a chocolate bar cannot magically add more chocolate than you started with. Same thing here (although it is a bit more complicated, due to the vet who previously didn't touch overland, as I just referenced).

Your increased difficulty option is: don't repair your gear and don't charge your weapons. lol